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Śaṅkara’s Deception By the
druid Finn Śaṅkara (8th
c. CE) presents himself as the restorer and defender of śruti—the authoritative revelation of the Veda. His declared mission was
philological and theological: to recover, interpret, and uphold the truth of
the Vedic revelation against the proliferating heterodoxies of his
time—Buddhism, Jainism, and materialist atomism among them. Yet Śaṅkara’s real achievement lay not in
recovering śruti but in reconstructing it, even falsifying it, to serve a political
and priestly agenda. The
deception begins with Śaṅkara’s sleight
of hand: he included the Upaniṣads, composed
long after the early Vedic hymns, within the category of śruti—that is, of revelation rather than reflection. This single semantic
manoeuvre allowed him to claim that the Upaniṣadic
insights into Brahman were not philosophical novelties but the true esoteric
meaning of the ancient ritual hymns. The problem, however, was that the two
bodies of text were fundamentally incompatible. The Vedas articulated a
dualist cosmos—humans, gods, and elements locked in transactional reciprocity
(yajña). The Upaniṣads, in contrast,
gestured toward a monist insight: that all apparent multiplicity is a local
manifestation of one undivided reality. To unify them was impossible without
distortion. Śaṅkara’s
solution was to invent Advaita—literally “non-two.” But “non-two” is not a positive statement; it is
apophatic, a negation without definition. It is not a theory but a
placeholder, a fog that conceals contradiction. It allowed Śaṅkara to maintain an ambiguous
stance—neither dualist nor monist, yet able to appropriate the authority of
both. When it served the ritual hierarchy and priestly power, he could speak
as a dualist, affirming karma, ritual, and caste duty (dharma). When confronting
metaphysical rivals or offering solace to the elite, he could switch to the
“higher” monism of Brahman as the sole reality. This
was not as a philosophical reconciliation but a political survival strategy:
a “fudge” designed to protect the authority of the Brahmin order. By
maintaining the double language of paramārthika satya
(absolute truth) and vyāvahārika satya (empirical truth), Śaṅkara
institutionalised a cognitive dualism that permitted the priest-politician to
rule both worlds—the metaphysical and the mundane. From
the Procedural
Monism standpoint, the contrast
is stark. Dualism, Finn argues, is the adaptive stance of the immature or dependent
being, who requires external regulation—gods, rulers, laws, or ideals.
Monism, by contrast, is the stance of the mature, autonomous being who has
internalised the Universal Procedure and acts from its logic within his own
bounded space. Śaṅkara’s so-called
“non-dualism,” far from advancing monism, in fact entrenched dualist
dependency by cloaking it in mystical language. Hence
the figure of the jīvanmukta, the “liberated while living,” becomes the final expression of Śaṅkara’s compromise. The jīvanmukta is permitted to know that he is Brahman—but not to be Brahman. He may realise identity in thought but not enact it in
autonomy. The formula “Know thyself” thus replaces
“Be thyself,” just as in ancient Greece knowledge was exalted over being to
preserve the polis’ hierarchy and keep wisdom safely abstract. Śaṅkara’s
invention of Advaita was the decisive cultural turning point. By substituting
epistemic recognition for ontological enactment, Śaṅkara
froze India in a state of ritual and social infancy. His Advaita was not
liberation but containment—an ideology that sanctified dependency by
spiritualising it. True monism grants equivalence to all emergents:
every being is a perfect, though bounded, iteration of the Universal
Emergence Procedure (i.e., Brahman). Such a view would have dissolved caste,
priesthood, and the mediating fictions of divine hierarchy. Therefore,
Śaṅkara’s “non-duality” appears as
history’s great semantic firewall: a priestly invention that preserved power by postponing maturation.
India’s philosophical adulthood—its shift from knowing to being—was
indefinitely deferred. The lesson is that every culture repeats this pattern:
knowledge is permitted only so long as it does not threaten control. The
priest becomes politician; the philosopher becomes regulator. Only the mature
monist—the one who is the Procedure/Brahman in his space—breaks the deception by acting
from the universal rule itself. |